Surveillance, Encryption, and Cypherpunks in David Golumbia’s “Cyberlibertarianism”

Introduction

Written by the late English professor David Golumbia and published by the University of Minnesota Press in November 2024, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology presents a scathing critique of nearly every branch of contemporary digital activism. According to Golumbia, the contemporary world—sorry, the United States (Golumbia’s analysis is delimited by an implicit and unacknowledged American Exceptionalism)—is caught in a battle between two cosmic forces: democracy, which means equality, justice, and self-determination, and cyberlibertarianism, a nebulous right-wing ideology that pervades the entire discourse surrounding digital technologies, even in self-defined left-wing spaces. In Golumbia’s view, democracy is the most important, most precious social and political concept we have, and cyberlibertarianism is the antithesis of democracy.

The danger of cyberlibertarianism is that it undermines democracy by undermining governmental power. “One of cyberlibertarianism’s chief effects is to minimize or eliminate the power of democratic governments to choose which technologies fit their vision of a healthy society,” Golumbia warns. But “the future of democracy depends on the ability of citizens to reclaim that power from the companies and technologists that have so effectively undermined it” (xxiii). Following other scholars who have called for democratic intervention into the world of digital technologies, Golumbia argues that licensure, regulation, or even outright abolition are warranted and desirable methods for reversing the status quo and again subjecting technology to democracy (xxiii).

On the one hand, part of Golumbia’s thesis is, on the surface, hardly objectionable: instead of allowing massive corporations like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft to continue developing and deploying technologies that harm society, we should use the power of democracy to rein in abuse, exploitation, and unaccountable corporate power. On the other hand, Golumbia aims his criticisms not at the structural power of Big Tech but at a spectral ideology that supposedly guides all conversations about technology, even in relatively small academic and activist spaces.

Chief among those academics and activists who are subjected to Golumbia’s wrath are the cypherpunks and, by extension, anyone who adopts the ideology of “encryptionism,” which he defines as anyone “who promotes encryption as a special and fundamental right, regardless of whether they explicitly endorse cypherpunk politics” (249). While some parts of Golumbia’s argument demonstrate hints of scholarly insight, such insight is completely absent on every page of Cyberlibertarianism in which the cypherpunks are discussed. Golumbia’s account of the cypherpunks is so terrible that it has superseded the works of Thomas Rid and Enrico Beltramini to become the single worst analysis of the cypherpunk movement to date.

This review of Cyberlibertarianism does not present a comprehensive analysis of Golumbia’s overall argument but instead focuses on his rather unhinged commentary on the cypherpunks and the major figures associated with the movement. The first section sets the context for Golumbia’s anti-cypherpunk tirade by explaining his puzzling and often contradictory views on surveillance encryption. Golumbia favors mass surveillance conducted by “democratic” governments but opposes mass surveillance conducted by corporations, as if the former does not depend on the latter. The second section recounts his overall comments about the cypherpunk movement, which he reduces to a bastardized version of Tim May’s crypto-anarchism. Here, Golumbia either ignores or simply lies about the relevant primacy and secondary sources. The third section responds to Golumbia’s criticism of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which also ignores the relevant primacy and secondary sources. Golumbia’s take on Assange is nothing more than a sustained ad hominem in which he lies about what his cited sources actually say. The fourth section turns to Golumbia’s criticisms of Edward Snowden, criticisms that merely repeat the tired national security state lies about the NSA whistleblower. Again, Golumbia cites nothing that Snowden has written and nothing that scholars have written about him.

In his Foreword, George Justice—English scholar, Provost at University of Tulsa, and Golumbia’s friend and colleague—proclaims that Cyberlibertarianism is Golumbia’s “magnum opus” (xvii) and “the culmination of his life’s work” (xi). To be sure, even great works have flaws, but the flaws in Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism are so striking that they transformed a supposed magnum opus into mega nope. At best, Cyberlibertarianism is a missed opportunity to inspire new ways of understanding the politics of digital technologies. At worst, Cyberlibertarianism is a laughable screed—replete with obfuscations, contradictions, informal fallacies, ill-informed takes, erroneous claims, and sometimes outright fabrications. Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology unquestionably stands as the single worst “scholarly” account of the cypherpunks in particular and the encryption debates more broadly, making it a candidate for worst book of 2024.

The Troubling Trouble that Isn’t So Troubling: Golumbia on Digital Surveillance

Golumbia is extremely confused about surveillance. On the one hand, he takes a critical stance on corporate mass surveillance, or what is often referred to, following Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism. Citing Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Golumbia expresses his opposition to corporate mass surveillance and argues that many of the surveillance technologies used by Big Tech ought to be abolished. He positively cites an interview in which Zuboff argues that democracies should criminalize the corporate practices of “data extraction and behavioral manipulation,” practices which he says “are the literal stuff of surveillance capitalism” (83).1 Extrapolating from Zuboff’s arguments, Golumbia argues that a number of corporate surveillance methods ought to be abolished: “those technologies that make possible tracking, monitoring, and especially manipulating behavior, whether for profit or not” (402), “[m]ost forms of biometric data collection, and the post-processing of that data” (404), and “visual and auditory surveillance systems and voice-­activated devices of many sorts” (404).

On the other hand, however, Golumbia champions government mass surveillance. “It is true,” Golumbia axiomatically asserts, “that every government must have the power to surveil all telecommunications (and to some extent, even physical, non-electronic communications) in which its citizens engage” (123). He does not argue this point; he simply treats is as self-evident. He does not even distinguish between “democratic” government and “authoritarian” governments, a common refrain elsewhere the book. But without an argument and without context, it is not clear why readers should accept this claim. In fact, it is not clear why readers should not immediately find the claim suspect, as many are likely to do. Golumbia seems to imply that effective government as such becomes impossible without mass electronic surveillance, but to establish this point, he would have to demonstrate, using examples, that every government without mass electric surveillance capabilities failed. Yet Golumbia fails to cite even one example of this phenomenon.

Not only does Golumbia fail to defend his claim that government mass surveillance is legitimate, he also does not seem to understand how government mass surveillance works. In a country like the United States, government mass surveillance is quite simply impossible without cooperation from telecommunication conglomerates and internet service providers. In The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford provided the earliest account of corporations cooperating with government surveillance agencies, like the NSA, seeking mass surveillance capabilities.2 In No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald is unequivocal about the “close collaboration between the NSA and private corporations” in the post-9/11 era.3 In Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Jacob Appelbaum comments on “the blurring of the state and corporation,” not only because private companies often cooperate with government surveillance programs but because private companies in the form of national security contractors increasingly constitute an essential structural component of the government surveillance apparatus.4 Finally, as Cory Doctorow notes, “the only really affordable and tractable way to conduct mass surveillance on the scale practiced by modern states — both ‘free’ and autocratic states — is to suborn commercial services.”5 The evidence is clear: in its current configurations, the government mass surveillance that Golumbia champions would be impossible without the corporate mass surveillance and that Golumbia laments.

The contradictions in Golumbia’s stance on mass surveillance are further complicated by his anti-encryption views. According to Golumbia, the most concerning effect of encryption is that it supposedly prevents law enforcement from investigating and prosecuting criminals. In one early passage in the book, he complains that “encryption advocates demand that governments be unable to surveil or retrospectively examine electronic communications even with a legal warrant because of what they call ‘privacy.’” The term “privacy,” Golumbia forebodingly warns, “has rarely, if ever, been used in any prior democratic context to mean that law enforcement and legislators should never be able to serve properly executed warrants” (xx). Later in the book, in a brief reference to the Apple versus FBI debate about encryption, Golumbia complains that “many see Apple as a civil rights actor, given that its mission is to sell products that block the serving of legal, targeted warrants” (311). In Golumbia’s world, strong encryption is dangerous because it prevents legitimate law enforcement from executing legitimate law.

There are two central problems with Golumbia’s naive and ultimately uninformed take on encryption. The first problem is that he radically overstates, without evidence, that encryption actually prevents law enforcement from enforcing law. For instance, “in 2017, the FBI claimed that encryption prevented them from accessing data on 7,800 smart phones, but the agency later admitted that the number was truly only about twenty-five percent of that.”6 And like other anti-encryption fanatics, Golumbia fails to cite a single instance in which the FBI’s inability to access data on those phones prevented them from successfully prosecuting any offenders. In fact, the FBI often succeeds in breaking a phone’s encryption with the help of private firms, which Golumbia must know since he admits that “most encryption is not entirely unbreakable” (253). In other words, Golumbia’s issue is not with the “fact” of unbreakable encryption undermining law enforcement but with the supposed universal belief among encryption advocates that unbreakable encryption is desirable solely because it threatens to undermine law enforcement. For someone who repeatedly condemns so-called cyberlibertarians for ignoring expertise in relevant fields, Golumbia certainly goes out of his way to ignore the work of Susan Landau, one of the leading experts on encryption whose informed conclusions stand in glaring contrast to Golumbia’s confused ranting.7

The second problem with Columbia’s take on encryption is that it contradicts his opposition to corporate mass surveillance. His principle seems to be: Any use of digital technology that impedes law enforcement’s ability to successfully execute a warrant in the name of “privacy” ought to be prohibited by law. Here, we can draw a comparison between encrypted text messages and VPN logs. If someone sends an encrypted message using iMessage, then Apple cannot decrypt it even if presented with a warrant. In this scenario, Golumbia would argue that encryption has prevented or at least impeded the legitimate enforcement of law. Similarly, if someone uses a VPN provider that keeps no logs of user activity, then that VPN provider cannot provide logs of user activities even if presented with a warrant. In this scenario, Golumbia would argue that the failure to keep VPN logs has prevented or at least impeded the legitimate enforcement of law. If Golumbia insists that corporations be able to break the encryption on their products, then he must also insist that VPN providers retain logs of all under activities, perhaps permanently, lest the VPN users be allowed to subvert law using an encrypted tunnel.

But requiring VPN providers retain logs of all under activities increases corporate surveillance, which Golumbia claims to oppose. Here we have a classic reductio ad absurdum: If the principle “Any use of digital technology that impedes law enforcement’s ability to successfully execute a warrant in the name of ‘privacy’ ought to be prohibited by law” is true, then Golumbia must embrace, rather than oppose, some level of corporate surveillance. After all, if corporations did not surveil their customers and store the data, then what data would the government even need a warrant to access? The entire argument is nonsense.

As the preceding discussion demonstrates, Golumbia has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to surveillance. While he rightly opposes corporate mass surveillance, he problematically embraces government mass surveillance. Because he does not seem to understand how government mass surveillance works in the United States, and because he goes to great lengths to ignore cryptographic experts while distorting the relevant facts, his argument runs into a series of odd contradictions. At best, Golumbia has left out a series of recommendations necessary to make his arguments work; at worst, Golumbia has raved for pages and pages about something that he does not understand. To be sure, values play an important role in any scholarly or academic research, cryptographic research included. But that does not excuse Golumbia’s hypocritical attempt to disregard decades of research and debate while accusing his perceived opponents as doing the same.

It Is What It Is Except When It Isn’t: Golumbia on The Cypherpunks

Golumbia’s disregard for expertise in the context of surveillance and encryption pales in comparison to his disregard for expertise in the context of understanding the cypherpunks. Like other writers who simply hate or fear the cypherpunk movement, Golumbia goes out of his way to present cypherpunks as a monolithic group of anti-government conspiracy theorists determined to destroy civilization. In fact, many of Golumbia’s criticisms of the cypherpunks seems to come straight from chapter seven of Thomas Rid’s anti-cypherpunk screed Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History.8 Of course, Golumbia does not cite Rid, for doing so would place Golumbia in the company of other fanatics who support the United States’s imperial project. In Cyberlibertarianism, Golumbia recapitulates the standard errors in scholarship on the cypherpunks: (1) equate “cypherpunk” with “crypto-anarchy,” (2) present a straw man of Tim May’s crypto-anarchist philosophy, (3) present all other cypherpunks as disciples of May, and along the way, (4) ignore or even lie about all relevant research that challenges the superficial account presented.

“Everywhere in digital culture we see the remarkable influence of the so-called cypherpunks and crypto-­anarchists,” Golumbia begins (109). Interestingly, Golumbia never defines “cypherpunk.” Instead, he suggest that “cypherpunk” is a synonym for “crypto-­anarchism,” and then never defines the latter except through associations with other political and intellectual movements. Golumbia continues: “the cypherpunks have from the beginning been saturated in far-­right philosophy,” the most important of which is anarcho-­capitalism, which he describes as “one of the most obvious sites where a version of ‘radical libertarianism’ bleeds without friction into outright fascism” (110). Without a detailed exegesis of primary texts and relevant theory, it is difficult to see how an anti-state anarchist philosophy like anarcho-­capitalism “bleeds without friction” into fascism, one of the most statist ideologies in modern western politics. Nevertheless, anarcho-­capitalism is important to the history of cypherpunk philosophy because, as May (2001c) openly acknowledges, anarcho-­capitalism—a form of social organization that has no state or law but is instead governed by market forces—is the economic version of his crypto-­anarchist philosophy. In fact, May is clear that the term crypto-­anarchy refers to the fact that, in his view, “the technology of crypto makes this form of anarchy possible.”9

Golumbia’s warrant for equating “cypherpunk” and “crypto-­anarchism” is his claim that Tim May, an avowed anarcho-­capitalist and crypto-­anarchism, is “often referred to as the founder of the movement” (110). Here, Golumbia ignores the mountain of literature that acknowledges roles of Eric Hughes, John Gilmore, and Jude Milhon in founding the movement.10 What’s more, he also ignores the scholarship demonstrating that not all cypherpunks are crypto-­anarchists. Robert Manne has noted the pluralism within the cypherpunk movement: “while the overwhelming majority of cypherpunks were..anarcho–capitalist libertarians, some were straitlaced Republicans, left-leaning liberals, Wobblies or even Maoists…The cypherpunks formed a house of many rooms. The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the political significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for privacy and unfettered freedom in cyberspace.”11 More recently, in Cypherpunk Ethics: Radical Ethics for the Digital Age, I argued at length (with a detailed examination of primary sources) that Julian Assange’s version of cypherpunk philosophy—both in its meta-ethics and in its political philosophy—is often diametrically opposed to the crypto-­anarchism espoused by May.12 Even though Cypherpunk Ethics is the first (and to date, only) manuscript-length scholarly treatment on the cypherpunks, Golumbia ignores the argument and continues to assert many of the baseless claims challenged in the book.

“The cypherpunk community’s active promotion of Nazism and white supremacy indicates a natural affinity between its view of technology and its politics,” Golumbia says without citations, adding, “A significant number of the most prominent cypherpunk voices have expressed fascist opinions,” a claim also unsupported by citations. The closest he comes to a direct citation of any cypherpunk “actively promoting” these kinds of ideologies is May’s acknowledgment that the privacy afforded by encryption can enable privacy for even undesirable groups. As Golumbia writes:

This is evident in section 2.5.17 of the “Cyphernomicon,” which asks, “Will strong crypto help racists?” May answers without hesitation, “Yes, this is a consequence of having secure virtual communities. Free speech tends to work that way!” He continues, “The Aryan Nation can use crypto to collect and disseminate information, even into ‘controlled’ nations like Germany that ban groups like Aryan Nation.” That May considers this a positive can’t help but be inferred from his final statement that “strong crypto will enable and empower groups who have different beliefs than the local majority, and will allow them to bypass regional laws”—­ where Nazism is explicitly characterized as “different beliefs than the local majority” as if that is a reasonable description. (111-112)

Golumbia intentionally obfuscates the difference between the normative and the descriptive in May’s comments. Normatively, May is advocating the use of encryption to bypass speech restrictions that may be imposed on individuals by their communities, a position entirely consistent with his individualist, anti-democratic politics. Descriptively, May is acknowledging that all manner of groups will be able to use encryption to bypass such speech restrictions. But this distinction is important because May is not “actively promoting” Nazism.

To be sure, Tim May was extremely racist and held many social views that any sensible person ought to reject. In fact, I quote some of those views in Cypherpunk Ethics.13 What’s more, I think May’s philosophy of crypto-­anarchism is objectionable in its ethics, politics, and economics. But all of these things about May and his views can be effectively criticized without twisting the meaning of a text. After all, I’ve done it!

Of course, this is not good enough for Golumbia, who accuses anyone who attempts scholarship on the cypherpunks of being anti-intellectual sophists bent on attacking the movement’s detractors. “As with so many other movements of the far right,” he insists, “accurate descriptions of the politics of cypherpunks are met not just with disagreement, but with ad hominem denunciations of those who point out what the movement’s founders have themselves said publicly. The ideas of the cypherpunks have become more prominent, leading to a burgeoning industry of commentators who reinterpret the story of its origins and purpose” (112). In this odd version of reality, those who accuse all cypherpunks of “actively promoting” fascism have given “accurate descriptions” of their politics, while those who seek to study the interesting contours of the movement merely “reinterpret” (namely, distort) the true history of the cypherpunks while hurling insults at anyone who disagrees. In other words, there can be no legitimate understandings of the cypherpunks except Golumbia’s.

The shortcomings of Golumbia’s analysis is further revealed when we note that he cites only two pieces of scholarship on the cypherpunks. First, immediately after the passage quoted above, Golumbia cites Enrico Beltramini’s “Against Technocratic Authoritarianism: A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement” as a paradigmatic examples of the reinterpreter tendency in cypherpunk scholarship. As readers of the WikiLeaks Bibliography will know, not only did I previously write a scathing critique of Beltramini’s insipid attempt at scholarship on the cypherpunks, I also reported the article for plagiarism. Interestingly and ironically, Golumbia criticizes Beltramini for many of the same things I criticized him for—including his failure to acknowledge his source material and his failure to engage relevant texts—but Golumbia also fails to cite or acknowledge my response to Beltramini. Along the way, Golumbia learns the wrong lesson from Beltramini: Golumbia cites Beltramini as problematic because his work is paradigmatic and authoritative on the cypherpunks, but the real lesson of Beltramini’s article is that scholarship on the cypherpunks is so under-specialized that bullshit can pass so-called “peer review.” “Work by Beltramini and others,” Golumbia concludes, “is an unfortunate embodiment of the desire to redescribe the movement’s politics to obscure its right-­wing nature” (114). No—it is an unfortunate embodiment of the sad state of scholarship in this field.14

Second, in the last chapter of the book, Golumbia cites one other piece of scholarship on the cypherpunks: my article, “Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful: The Cypherpunk Ethics of Julian Assange.”15 This article was actually the first academic attempt to understand WikiLeaks as a product of the cypherpunk movement, and its aim was to show that, because scholars had ignored the relevant primary and secondary sources, they had misinterpreted WikiLeaks. “In a recent full-­throated defense of Assange,” Golumbia writes, setting my entry into the discussion, “Patrick Anderson (2021, 307) avoids all discussion of either cypherpunk or Assange’s personal politics. At the center of those cypherpunk ethics and Assange’s own is the slogan ‘transparency for the powerful, privacy for the weak’” (367). This is complete nonsense: How do I avoid discussing cypherpunk and Assange’s personal politics when the title and focus of my paper is on a slogan that Golumbia himself says is “at the center” of cypherpunk ethics and Assange’s personal politics? How do I avoid discussing cypherpunk and Assange’s personal politics when my paper is literally the only paper that does so? There are so many violations of the basic standards of scholarship in Golumbia’s short paragraph on my work that there is not room here to address them all here, so I had to write about it elsewhere.16

Given Golumbia’s distortion of May’s work and his abuse of the relevant scholarship, it is not surprising that he builds a straw man out of the entire cypherpunk movement. Even though Golumbia cites both Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet and “Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful: The Cypherpunk Ethics of Julian Assange,” he pretends he has never heard the cypherpunk argument for differential openness based on power relations. As he writes:

Everything should be maximally private, we will read from them on one day; everything must be maximally open, we will read the next. There are no contradictions, digital evangelists insist: it is obvious that everything must be private and that everything must be open, and further, it is obvious where and how each of these contradictory principles apply. (xxii)

While it may be true that some digital activists, including some cypherpunks, are guilty of the contradiction described here, Golumbia cites no examples. He simple levels his charge and moves on. This criticism is not even original, for David Brin make the same charge against the cypherpunks over twenty-five years again in The Transparent Society, another text not cited by Golumbia.17 Contra Brin and Golumbia, I provided a deeper account of the cypherpunk slogan in Cypherpunk Ethics, writing:

For the cypherpunks, privacy is something that individuals and relatively powerless organizations are permitted by right and guaranteed by encryption, while secrecy is something that powerful organizations use to hide their nefarious, unjust, and anti-democratic plans. Likewise, vulnerability describes the condition of individuals when their personal data is known by others (especially without their knowledge or consent), while transparency describes the condition of organizations and institutions when their data is made available to publics. On the individual scale, privacy and vulnerability are inversely related, and the same holds true for transparency and secrecy on the institutional scale. Societies defined by high levels of vulnerability and secrecy will be extremely authoritarian, centralized, and unjust; societies defined by high levels of privacy and transparency will be open, decentralized, and just.18

While there might be some legitimate debate regarding contexts and power relations when applying the cypherpunk slogan in practice, it is far from a self-contradictory view as Golumbia would have us believe.

Golumbia also constructs a straw man out of the cypherpunk’s concerns about surveillance, claiming that they only fear government surveillance when, in fact, the cypherpunks have long warned about the dangers of corporate surveillance. In “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” one of the founding documents of the movement, Eric Hughes writes, “We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.”19 In Cypherpunks, which includes an entire chapter titled “Private Sector Spying,” Jérémie Zimmerman echos Hughes: “State-sponsored surveillance is indeed a major issue which challenges the very structure of all democracies…but there is also private surveillance and potentially private mass collection of data.”20 To be sure, Golumbia’s misunderstanding of the cypherpunks’ position on corporate surveillance is so common that cypherpunk Daniel Bernstein recently criticized the president of the Signal Foundation for making the same false claim.21 While it may be true that some, even many, cypherpunks are anarcho-capitalists, opposition to corporate surveillance has always been a major tenant of cypherpunk politics, from the 1990s to today. But Golumbia cannot acknowledge this fact because it would undermine his entire argument that the movement is nothing but a bunch of government-hating, corporation-loving wackos seeking to destroy America.

Finally, just as Golumbia does not understand the technologies that enable digital surveillance, neither does he understand encryption. Perplexed by “leftists” who champion encryption, Golumbia wonders if they aren’t inadvertently sucked into Nazism when they use an encrypted messaging app. “No doubt, leftists can use encrypted messaging services to organize just as much as Nazis can,” he admits. “But does it follow from this that the tools have no politics?” (111). On the surface, Golumbia raises an interesting question about technological neutrality, the claim that technology has no inherent good or bad values but is instead neutral. According to those who accept technological neutrality, it is the user, not the object, that is morally responsible for any harm that comes from the technology. A paradigm example of technological neutrality appears in the gun rights debate: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. On this view, guns are not responsible for violence and death, the shooters are responsible for violence and death.

Technological neutrality is, of course, widely rejected by philosophers of technology, and a book about the non-neutrality of encryption would be fascinating. But Golumbia is not interested in serious philosophical reflections about encryption technology. Instead, he argues that encryption is inherently fascistic because crypto-anarchists and anti-government capitalists find it so useful. Here, Golumbia is at his most anti-intellectual, for his completely disregards both the sweeping historical development of cryptography so masterfully recounted in David Kahn’s The CodeBreakers and the gradual militarization of cryptography in the twentieth-century, a shift documented by James Bamford.22 As Charles Berret recently argued, “cryptography could not have become invested with these deep political commitments if it hadn’t been suppressed in research and the media during the postwar years. The greater the force exerted to dissuade writers and scientists from studying cryptography, the more the subject became wrapped in the luminous aura of civil disobedience.”23 Indeed, in the 1976 paper that is credited with making digital encryption possible, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman lamented the fact that cryptographic research “has been discouraged in the recent past by a near total government monopoly.”24 Again, Golumbia’s failure to research his topics of discussion not only undermines his credibility but leads him into contradiction. If encryption is inherently fascistic and everyone who uses encryption is sucked into the fascist drift, then the United States government, which is arguable one of the most prominent users of encryption in human history, is fascistic, a conclusion again at odds with Golumbia’s rhetoric about “democracy.”

Sadly, just as Golumbia has failed to understand surveillance, he has failed to understand the cypherpunks and encryption. Once again, the stakes are high because of Golumbia’s own rhetoric about his perceived enemies. “The self-­ identified ‘cypherpunks’ routinely wax authoritatively on matters on which they have no background whatsoever, such as diplomacy, intelligence, military operations, and state security,” he reprimands. “Such lack of context might be excusable were they autodidacts who engaged deeply with the wide range of materials and personal expertise available on these topics; instead, they typically dismiss such knowledge with a variety of business-derived, conspiratorial rhetorical gestures involving ‘gatekeepers,’ ‘incumbents,’ and the like” (25). Seems as though Golumbia should mind his own scholarship before chastising others.

The Absence of Evidence Isn’t Evidence of Absence: Golumbia on Julian Assange

As I have argued elsewhere, hatred of Julian Assange is one of the most common reasons scholarship on the cypherpunks is so horrendous, and this observation remains true in Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism.25 Golumbia makes passing reference to Assange throughout the book, but deep into chapter 2, readers are met with an unequivocal denunciation of the WikiLeaks founder. “This is not an exaggeration,” he proclaims: “Assange is a proto-­Nazi political provocateur whose overt anti-Semitism, anti-­Black racism, climate change denial, misogyny, hatred for democracy, and support for authoritarian political regimes…routinely fail to penetrate the minds of observers who see as dispositive his use of digital tools and antiestablishment affect” (116). To paraphrase, because Assange uses computers, no one but Golumbia sees Assange for the racist, sexist, fascist that he truly is—an amazing research finding if there ever was one. Interestingly, readers are told to “see chapter 7 for discussion of Assange’s career-­long leanings toward fascism,” suggesting that all the citations for those inflammatory remarks are provided. Golumbia cites his sources alright, but they do not always say what he claims they say. He cites no relevant scholarship (except myself) and no relevant primary sources (except Cypherpunks). In other words, Golumbia works no deeper than headlines to substantiate the claims he makes about Assange.

Before jumping to chapter 7, it is illustrative to examine the first citation Golumbia provides for his claims about Assange.“Assange directly intervened in a U.S. election through cooperation with Roger Stone, who himself used Jones and other conspiracy theorists for just that purpose,” Golumbia claims, following up with a citation to a 2020 New York Times article titled “Roger Stone Was in Contact With Julian Assange in 2017, Documents Show.” While it is possible that Assange directly intervened in a U.S. election through cooperation with Roger Stone, this Times article does not support that claim. As the author, Sharon LaFaniere, explains, “Records show [Stone] exchanged messages with Mr. Assange in June 2017, seven months after Mr. Trump’s election victory.” “The records shed no new light on whether Mr. Stone, 67, directly communicated with Mr. Assange before the election,” she adds. One wonders how Assange was able to cooperate with Stone to intervene in the election if the documents provided and the article cited only show that the two men had contact seven months after the election was concluded. It appears Golumbia has a track record of claiming a cited source supports a claim when it explicitly states the opposite, a real concern for the academic integrity of the work.

Once the reader makes it to chapter 7, “Cyberlibertarianism and the Far Right,” they find an extended discussion of Assange’s supposed right-wing views. “While hagiographic accounts of Assange’s life and work portray him as a heroic whistleblower and journalist focused on a just society,” Golumbia complains, “more neutral and objective accounts paint a different picture, even when those accounts come from Assange’s close associates who believe (or at one time believed) in his apparent mission” (364). Golumbia proceeds to provide a “neutral and objective” account of Assange in which he ignores relevant primary and secondary sources and instead turns to a few statements by former WikiLeaks associates and supporters. For example, he makes much of Daniel Domscheit-­Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, written after the author left WikiLeaks over personal and political conflicts with Assange.26 He also cites a New York Times guest essay by Die Zeit editor Jochen Bittner, titled “How Julian Assange Is Destroying WikiLeaks.” Along the same lines, he cites a Guardian essay by Daniel Mathews, a friend and colleague of Assange’s who explains, as the title suggests, “Why I Resigned from the WikiLeaks Party.” For Golumbia, these testimonies substantiate his claim that Assange is a dangerous, anti-democracy scoundrel who ought to be opposed at all costs.

Yet when we consider these testimonies in context, we see that much of the issue stems from disagreements over strategy and associations rather than conflicts over substantive fascist politics. According to Bittner, for instance, WikiLeaks is a brilliant idea, but there is “an ideology behind” Assange’s idea of transparency, and that ideology is authoritarianism, he says, because Assange’s show, The World Tomorrow, appeared on the Russian channel RT. Bittner also claims that Assange believes that there’s “no such thing as a legitimate secret” and that “redacting sensitive material” in leaked documents “equals manipulating it.” These tired proclamations do not stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Noted journalist and antiwar intellectual Chris Hedges also had a show on RT, but that was because he was excommunicated from mainstream journalism in the US, where antiwar voices are prohibited. Regarding the redaction of documents, Assange has long argued redactions cannot be made without ideological influences, as evidenced by how WikiLeaks’ newspaper partners redacted all manner of information for political and economic reasons rather than ethical reasons.27 Besides, critics of WikiLeaks frequently (and falsely) claim the documents they publish are fabrications, and redacting information would simply lend credibility to these charges. Thus, WikiLeaks does not redact because Assange lacks careful consideration; it does not redact because careful consideration led Assange to realize there are practical and principled reasons for not doing so. (Side Note: Does Golumbia realize that under Bittner’s editorial direction, Die Zeit published an essay by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022? Seems as though one of Golumbia’s most important testimonials is associated with and provides a platform for authoritarianism!) The same reply can be made about Domscheit-­Berg and Mathews, whose problems with Assange are at least partly a matter of strategy. Even if Assange was a complete asshole in his personal treatment of any of these people, that still does not make him a Nazi.

Golumbia also accuses Assange of climate change denial because WikiLeaks re-published the “Climategate” emails from researchers at Britain’s University of East Anglia (it did not originally publish them). Yet Assange has always been clear that WikiLeaks will host suppressed documents of all kinds. Most importantly, WikiLeaks re-publishing of the Climategate emails followed almost exactly the organization’s prior re-publication of emails leaked from 2008 Republican Party Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin—and I am sure that Golumbia would agree that re-publishing leaked emails from a convective American politician is the most fascist thing an organization can do.

Finally, Golumbia accuses Assange of “anti-­Semitism,” “misogyny,” and “Holocaust denial.” To be sure, Golumbia’s sources do not unequivocally substantiate these accusations: much of this “evidence” takes the form of “Assange associates with so-and-so who said…” or “Assange hates Hillary Clinton.” To the extent that these sources do substantiate the accusations, it is also easy to find counterexamples. For example, when John Keane and Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney, pressed Assange to “come clean on his alleged misogyny,” Assange replied, “I’m not interested in softening my image by planting attractive women around me, as for instance George W. Bush did. I like women. They’re on balance braver than men, and I’ve worked with many in exposing projects that damage women’s lives. An example is the scandalous practice of UN peacekeepers trading food for sex that we exposed.” Later in the interview, Keane asks Assange about courage, and the WikiLeaks founder replies, “Women on average have more of it than men.” Citing examples like Raging Grannies, Pussy Riot, and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Assange adds, “These women show men what courage is. Treated as outsiders, women have learned the hard way how to deal with structural power. They’re consequently much more adaptable than men. The world of men is structured force.”28

According to Golumbia, among the hallmarks of cyberlibertaranism are the “persistent gestures” that resemble “a kind of ad hominem attack on critics’ motivations that makes it unnecessary to engage with the substance of their arguments” (82). If this is true, then Golumbia himself must be a crypto-fascist cyberlibertarian because his entire discussion of Assange boils down to simplistic ad hominem attacks that permit him to avoid any analysis of Assange’s arguments. In 400 pages, Golumbia dedicates a single page (two paragraphs) to discussing one primary source authored by Assange, and the purpose of this discussion is not to clarify Assange’s argument—after all, how could one five-page essay provide insight about the philosophy of a man who has several books under his name?—but to prove that Assange is simply a crypto-anarchist who hates democratic government (364-365). Not that the assumption is warranted, but even if we assume that all the nasty things Golumbia says are true and that Assange really is a racist, sexist, fascist, Golumbia has still failed to execute a work of scholarship on Assange because analysis cannot be made through ad hominem attack. It is easy to cite secondary sources that accuse someone of nefarious views—as a matter of fact, now that Cyberlibertaranism has been published, someone can cite Golumbia as “proof” that I am a Nazi sympathizer. Had Golumbia presented compelling counterarguments to the Assange’s positions on surveillance, privacy, scientific journalism, cybernetic states, or any other topic, this book would have made a meaningful contribution to the scholarship on digital technologies. On the topic of Assange and WikiLeaks, unfortunately, Golumbia did not even attempt such a contribution.

Golumbia suggests that Assange ought to be (or ought to have been) persecuted and prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but this was a Trump adminstration policy, followed up by the Biden adminstration. Does supporting a Trump policy make Golumbia a fascist? Does continuning a Trump policy make Biden a fascist? Golumbia’s nonsense provides no answers to these puzzles. If Golumbia is going to make an argument using guilt by association, he should stop associating with the associators whose guilt he has oddly associated with himself.

Americanism That Isn’t My Americanism is Anti-Americanism: Golumbia on Edward Snowden

By this point, it is clear that Golumbia simply does not understand most of what he discusses in the book: surveillance, encryption, cypherpunks, or WikiLeaks. Yet it is his attack on Edward Snowden that demonstrates his utter failure to study his object of study. “Snowden’s politics are often misunderstood by progressives and others who sympathize with his hostility toward the United States,” Golumbia insists (122). Problematically, Snowden is discussed over the course of approximately forty pages (or ten percent of the book), and Golumbia fails to cite a single primary source authored by Snowden himself and fails to cite a single scholarly source on Snowden or the NSA documents he provided to journalists. Instead, Golumbia cites over a dozen videos, popular press articles (many of which are authored by people who hate Snowden), and other random material from the internet. To be sure, there are good reasons to use such sources when context calls for them, but Golumbia relies on these sources only so he can completely ignore the primary and secondary texts that any minimum standard of scholarly acumen would require him to engage. When one reads Golumbia, one gets the impression that Snowden never authored a book in which he explains “the moral and ethical principles” that led him to blow the whistle (but he did), and one gets the impression that scholars never examined that book in an attempt to evaluate, or at least understand, Snowden’s moral and ethical principles (but they have).29 The problem with Cyberlibertaranism is not mere laziness but Golumbia’s blatant anti-intellectualism.

Golumbia begins is attack on Snowden by citing historian Sean Wilentz’s 2014 New Republic essay “Would You Feel Differently about Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?” According to Wilentz, Snowden is driven by the “political impulse” of “paranoid libertarianism” and seeks to “wound” the “modern liberal state.” After Barack Obama failed to reign in the NSA mass surveillance that was started under George W. Bush, Wilentz says that “Snowden hatched his plan for crippling the NSA.” Never mind that a decade after Snowden’s whistleblowing the NSA is operating as efficiently as ever.

Wilentz—a life-long Democratic Party insider and partisan hack—is not a reliable judge of motivations, especially when it comes to politics. Given Golumbia’s persistent denunciation of racists, certainly he would denounce Wilentz, who during the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary race, accused Obama of playing “the race-baiter card” and claimed that the soon-to-be first Black president “purposefully polluted the contest with a new strain of what historically has been the most toxic poison in American politics.” Calling the Obama campaign a “manipulative illusion,” he denounced the “the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama’s supposedly uplifting campaign.” For Wilentz, the greatest indictment of Obama was his imitation of white supremacist electrical strategies, charging Obama with executing “the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states’ rights.” Apparently, Golumbia has no problem associating his views the with views of racists like Wilentz. (Side Note: Because some readers are likely to take this part of the argument too seriously, it is necessary to point out that I am using a rhetorical maneuver to demonstrate how insipid Golumbia’s comments are. If a reader thinks what I just said is stupid, there is no way they can buy the claims on offer in Cyberlibertaranism.)

Of course, Golumbia does not need primary sources to opine about Snowden’s politics, for he can simply intuit them as if he is a medium of all conspiratorial fascism. In one incredible passage where he divines “the explicit and implicit political analyses Snowden offers,” Golumbia provides no citations for his claims. Snowden’s political analyses are, he says, “explicit because Snowden has always identified as a right-­leaning libertarian, with all the syncretism and incoherence attached to that position. They are implicit because Snowden accepts (and has expressed publicly) the right-libertarian belief that governmental power is particularly noxious and violent, so that corporate power is an entirely different thing on which we need not dwell” (117). How can Golumbia know Snowden’s explicit politics without citing any primary sources? Golumbia’s citational practices regarding Snowden are even worse than they are in his discussion of Assange, and the preceding example is enough to demonstrate this perverse problem with the book. Golumbia’s only point, which is neither original nor convincing, is that Snowden hates America, hates the government, and hates democracy, despite the fact that these accusations contradict Snowden’s explicitly expressed views.

Snowden’s “views” are not the only thing Golumbia attacks in his discussion of the NSA whistleblower, for Golumbia attempts to prove that Snowden’s revelations (1) do not constitute whistleblowing and (2) to the extent they do constitute whistleblowing, they did not shed light on any significant harms. First, he argues that Snowden was misguided in directing his concerns toward government because he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, “a powerful defense contractor,” and not directly for the government within the NSA (117). Second, he argues that Snowden demonstrates “no willingness to be held accountable for [his] actions within a democratic infrastructure,” ostensibly because he refuses to return to the United States and stand trial under the Espionage Act (119). Third, he insists that Snowden’s “relocation to Moscow” proves that he believes “democratic government is inherently illegitimate but that authoritarian government somehow promotes ‘liberty’” (126). Of course, all of this is demonstrably false. In Permanent Record, Snowden dedicates an entire chapter to analyzing national security contracting.30 And Snowden remains is Russia—where everyone knows he was trapped when the State Department cancelled his passport while he was en route to South America—because, in violation of the Bill of Rights, the Espionage Act does not permit defendants to make a proper defense in court.

Golumbia also insists that Snowden was not a whistleblower against mass surveillance because “much of what he released is not about that topic at all” (124). Importantly, Snowden did not release any documents. As he writes in Permanent Record, “I disclosed the government’s documents only to journalists. In fact, the number of documents that I disclosed to directly to the public is zero.”31 Golumbia then provides a litany of NSA practices revealed by journalists, such as diplomatic and economic spying, but apparently unrelated to mass surveillance. “We can object to states acting in this manner,” Golumbia concedes, “but it is hoped that we do so from a position of understanding what governments must do, rather than horror directed only at democratic governments spying” (124). Here is where Golumbia’s ideograph “democracy” reaches its limits: the United States was engaged in all manner of global surveillance not because of democracy but because of imperialism. And it was journalists—not Snowden—who decided it was in the public’s interest to know what its government was doing in its name. Golumbia’s feigned realism is a poor veil for his deliberate obfuscations of reality.

After arguing that Snowden is not a whistleblower, Golumbia admits that he was a whistleblower, at least in part. “The NSA discontinued the bulk collection program in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures,” he says, using a euphemism of the NSA, “which is one of the parts of those disclosures that most genuinely seems to qualify as whistleblowing” (123). Again, Golumbia’s facts are wrong: the bulk collection program was not ended by the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2015, it was merely privatized. Instead of the NSA storing all metadata from every telephone communication within the United States, the law permitted telecommunication companies to permanently store such records on behalf of the government, whose agents could access those records without warrants, thanks to the Supreme Court’s third party doctrine (see Smith v. Maryland). Much like scenario about the hypothetical VPN provider discussed above, the law actually deepens the relationship between corporations and the government, a relationship Golumbia spends so much time condemning in other contexts. Interestingly enough, this modified “bulk collection” program was eventually shut down when the first Trump administration declined to pursue its renewal. But the logic here is problematic, for Golumbia argues that Snowden is a whistleblower only because the NSA program was ended, then that means he would not have been a whistleblower if the agency had continued the program. In other words, the NSA—the very agency whose potentially actions were revealed—is the same agency who gets to decide whether the person exposing their illegal actives is a whistleblower.

One of Snowden’s arguments in support of blowing the whistle on NSA surveillance can be called a “harm minimization” or “harm prevention” justification. On this view, whistleblowing is permissible or even obligatory if the whistleblower has the power to stop or minimize serious harm. Golumbia obviously never discusses this argument, but he does reply to it, claiming that Snowden’s revelations stopped no harm whatsoever. To make his case, he cites two course cases in the United States: Hepting v. AT&T (2006) and United States v. Moalin (2020).

In Hepting v. AT&T, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of AT&T customers who claimed that cooperation between the telecommunication giant and the NSA harmed customers who were entitled to damages. AT&T and the US government tried to have the case dismissed, but the judge ordered both parties to supply the court with evidence that the joint public-private mass surveillance program was a national security necessity. While this order was pending, AT&T stalled by appealing the order in the circuit courts. However, before the case could conclude, the US Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which protected AT&T and other telecommunication companies who cooperated with the NSA from prosecution. As Green Greenwald succinctly describes it, the bill “granted full retroactive immunity, both civil and criminal, to the entire telecom industry, thus guaranteeing an end to the multiple lawsuits that had been filed against them. All possibility for further investigation into the massive spying program, and for judicial review of its legality, permanently ended on that day.”32

Given this background on Hepting v. AT&T, consider what Golumbia says about the case:

Part of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling had to do with the constitutionality of the data collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a particular hobbyhorse of the conspiratorial subset of Snowden supporters. Regardless of whether FISA gave the intelligence agencies too much power, the courts have been satisfied that it is (or was, in some cases) constitutional. Further, and even worse for those who see Snowden as a whistleblower, the plaintiffs in Hepting, attempting to constitute a class for purposes of challenging the constitutionality of any governmental data collection program, were unable to establish standing in the case. That is, they were unable to show how the program in question had harmed them, or even that they had been targeted by it. (124)

The curious reader might wonder why Golumbia’s description of Hepting v. AT&T is so radically different than mine. Well, that’s because Golumbia is not describing Hepting at all. Immediately before this passage, Golumbia cites an article titled “Ninth Circuit Deals 3rd Blow to NSA Spying Case,” written by Matthew Renda and published by Courthouse News in August 2021. Renda describes a court case similar to the one Golumbia describes, but the case is not Hepting but Jewel v. National Security Agency, a similar case from 2011 in which EFF filed a class action lawsuit against the government for harms imposed by mass surveillance. In other words, Golumbia was so sloppy and careless that he confused two different court cases, a mistake that he could have easily avoided if he had only clicked on the first link in Renda’s article, which provides direct access to a PDF of the court’s memorandum. If Golumbia has bothered to read anything about Hepting, he would have know that the Ninth Circuit never even ruled on the case, the very first detail he attributes to the case in the above passage.

What’s more, the plaintiffs in Jewel were unable to prove standing in the case because their adversaries in the NSA were the only ones with the evidence, and they were permitted to conceal the evidence on the grounds of the state secrets doctrine. To be clear—when Golumbia says that “they were unable to show how the program in question had harmed them,” it is not because the evidence was evaluated but because the government was permitted to conceal the evidence. The potential criminal was, in this case, permitted to hide evidence of their criminality and then claim there was no criminality, and Golumbia thinks this is a good thing.

Golumbia completely botches his attempted analysis of Hepting, and his analysis of United States v. Moalin is not much better. In 2013, Basaaly Moalin and three other Somali individuals were convicted of illegally fund-raising for Al-Shabaab, a Somali terrorist organization. In United States v. Moalin, the four defendants appealed their convictions on two primary grounds: first, that the court failed to suppress illegally collected evidence, particularly telephony metadata collected through the NSA’s mass surveillance program; second, that the government failed to provide notice regarding the collection and use of the plaintiffs’ telephony metadata as evidence in the case. Though the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the NSA’s bulk metadata collection was illegal because it exceeded the permissible scope of surveillance under FISA, it upheld the plaintiffs’ convictions because (a) the metadata was not used to establish probable cause and (b) because any potential violation of the notice requirement was incidental because the plaintiffs’ had ample opportunity to appeal their case.

For Golumbia, the Moalin case proves that no harm came from the NSA mass surveillance programs exposed by Snowden. However, because Golumbia does not seem to understand case law, his resulting word salad makes it difficult to determine what he is actually arguing. “The one case that seems to identify abuse,” he writes, “United States v. Moalin, illustrates the problems raised by Snowden’s disclosures” (123). Here, it is not clear whether the “problems” are problems with NSA surveillance or problems with Snowden’s decision to expose NSA surveillance. Citing “Metadata Collection Violated FISA, Ninth Circuit Rules,” written by Rachael Hanna and published by Lawfare Blog in September 2020, Golumbia summarizes the case, reaching a puzzling conclusion. “Yet even in a case where the defendants were convicted of just the sort of crime intelligence agencies are supposed to be looking for,” he proclaims, “the Court did eventually rule that their communications were not used this way. Had they been procured illegally, the resulting intelligence would have been inadmissible” (123).

No! It is evident that Golumbia did not even read Hanna’s summary of the case. Every passage Golumbia quotes from Hanna comes from the first two paragraphs of the article, which means he did not even take the time to read beyond the introduction. Furthermore, he reaches a conclusion that directly contradicts Hanna’s concluding remarks. As Hanna writes, “the court held that the NSA’s former telephony metadata collection program violated FISA. Thus, not only was the collection of Moalin’s phone records unauthorized under the statute, but so was the collection of millions of Americans’ phone records that were swept up in the program.” In other words, the metadata collected in the Moalin case was illegal. This is not difficult to understand, yet Golumbia deliberately obfuscates the truth to make the point he has already in advance determined is true. This is not empirical analysis—it’s dogmatic fabrication. This is not scholarship—it’s bullshit.

As if his incompetent handling of US case law could not be topped, Golumbia offers his readers a grand finale: a word salad accusation that Snowden loves authoritarian government. Two passages are most illustrative of Golumbia’s fanatical hatred of Snowden, so they are worth quoting at length:

[Snowden and Assange] have decided ahead of time that democracy is an entirely illegitimate excuse for authoritarianism, and that therefore authoritarianism is preferable. Thus, even though in both Assange’s and Snowden’s cases, they enjoy whatever freedoms they have due only to special dispensations that are not granted to other citizens of the states that have chosen to shelter them. (119)

Snowden does not oppose “the state”; he opposes the United States for what he claims are hypocritical positions about human rights from a location in which he enjoys far fewer of those rights than he did back home, precisely because he is in a privileged position to benefit from authoritarian power. (120-121)

According to Golumbia, the following claims are true: Assange and Snowden prefer authoritarianism over authoritarianism. Assange and Snowden enjoy special freedoms despite one being locked up for over thirteen years and the other being permanently exiled from his home country. Snowden has the privilege of enjoying fewer freedoms in Russia than he would in the United States. Snowden’s privilege to be less free stems from his hatred of the United States, which would allow him to be more free but he is a freedom-hating cyberlibertarian who loves freedom so much that he demands authoritarianism. Incredible.

Coming back to reality, it would have been fascinating to see Golumbia confront Snowden’s arguments about what America ought to be, given that both men seem to committed to America’s well-being and given that their ideas of what constitutes America’s well-being seems to sharply contrast. After all, public debate about the proper direction of the nation is an essential part of the democracy Golumbia claims to champion. But an intellectual endeavor of this sort seems beyond the scope of Golumbia’s rational faculties. Golumbia had an opportunity to engage the thought and principles of one of the most influential whistleblowers in modern history, but he threw that opportunity away because he preferred to disregard relevant primary and secondary sources, to cherrypick evidence, to lie about case law, and to fabricate all manner of falsehoods about his subject of study. Golumbia did not fail to understand Snowden because he never even tried.

Conclusion

As this review forcefully demonstrates, David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology simply fails to meet any reasonable standard of scholarship. With its fancy cover and university press imprint, it purports to be a work of academic research, but it is barely a laughable work of fiction. Golumbia endlessly complains about his perceived opponents’ anti-intellecualism, obscurantism, and incoherence while ironically producing a work paradigmatic of those exact traits. He claims his opponents do not understand topics they discuss, and Golumbia does not even have a cursory understanding of surveillance and encryption. He claims his opponents disregard “centuries” of intellectual debates, yet he cannot be bothered to cite primary and secondary sources published in the last twenty years. He claims his opponents resort to ad hominem attacks becasue they have no real arguments, yet his enitre discussion of cypherpunks, Assange, Snowden, and others are nothing more than ad hominem attacks. He claims that his opponents are not careful thinkers and then presents conceptually-confused, emprically-false claims using citations that support the opposite of what he says they say. He confuses court cases. He lies about what his sources say. He avoids reading relevant schoalrship. As a result, he produced one of the worst books any of us will have the displeasrue of having to read.

In the “Epilogue,” Golumbia writes, “democracies have not only the right but also the responsibility to determine whether certain technologies (construed broadly) are compatible with healthy and democratic societies” (403). True, but this insight is not enough to motiviate the argument for the book. Golumbia so quickly jumps to the conclusion that cyberlibertarianism is promoting democracy-destroy technologies that he never wonders whether these technologies flourished in the first place becasue—gasp!—the United States was not really democratic to begin with. Conservatively romanticizing a past that never was leads Golumbia down an absurd path, and we ought now follow.

Golumbia’s failure is regreatable, for is correct that certain technologies need to be reigned in or abolished. He is right to reject technological optimism about digital technologies. He is right that powerful corporations and wealthy individuals often benefit from obscuring the structures of society. He could have written a powerful book, but instead he wrote a stupid book. We cannot know what kinds of feedback his peer reviewers gave to a draft of the book or even how much of the work they were able to read. But if they did not unequivocally state that this book should not be published, they ought to be ashamed. The commissioning editor for this book ought to be ashamed. And University of Minnesota Press ought to be ashamed. For everyone who was involved with the publication of this book must have their credibility questioned, at least on the topics covered in the work.

Mangum opus, indeed.

Notes

  1. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019). See also ORF America, “Shoshana Zuboff Speaks on Big Tech Regulation: Who Knows? Who Decides Who Decides?,” YouTube, May 21, 2021: https://youtu.be/7W9Teyj_yF0?feature=shared
  2. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency (Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
  3. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Picador, 2014), 113.
  4. Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (OR Books, 2012), 53.
  5. Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Aug 26, 2020): https://archive.md/IVEOm
  6. Patrick D. Anderson, “Review of Crypto Wars—The Fight for Privacy in the Digital Age: A Political History of Digital Encryption,” Cryptologia 47, no. 3 (2023), 291; see also Craig Jarvis, Crypto Wars—The Fight for Privacy in the Digital Age: A Political History of Digital Encryption (CRC Press, 2021), 377–378.
  7. Susan Landau, “Testimony for House Judiciary Committee hearing on ‘The encryption tightrope: Balancing Americans’ security and privacy,” United States House of Representatives, Washington, DC (2016): https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160301/104573/HHRG- 114-JU00-Wstate-LandauS-20160301.pdf; Susan Landau, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (Yale University Press, 2017).
  8. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (W. W. Norton, 2016).
  9. Timothy C. May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities,” in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow (MIT Press, 2001), 69.
  10. See, for instance, Steve Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (Penguin, 2001); Robert Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary,” The Monthly, February 16, 2011: http://archive.fo/kwI60; Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information (Dutton, 2012); Patrick D. Anderson, “Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful: The Cypherpunk Ethics of Julian Assange,” Ethics and Information Technology 23, no. 3 (2021): 295–308; Jarvis, Crypto Wars; Patrick D. Anderson, Cypherpunk Ethics: Radical Ethics for the Digital Age (Routledge, 2022).
  11. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
  12. Anderson, Cypherpunk Ethics.
  13. Anderson, Cypherpunk Ethics, 34-35, 41.
  14. Patrick D. Anderson, “Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of the Cypherpunk Movement,” WikiLeaks Bibliography Blog, September 1, 2021: https://wikileaksbibliography.org/blog/prolegomena-to-any-future-historiography-of-the-cypherpunk-movement/. As I warned two years before Golumbia’s book supposedly passed peer review: “we can expect to see Beltramini’s work reverberate throughout the scholarship on cypherpunks for years to come. It will take at least a decade to correct the inaccuracies that have now entered the academic record.” Note that Golumbia’s major issue with Beltramini is actually one of the few things Beltramini gets right! As Golumbia observes, Beltramini “retells parts of the history of computer development in its intersections with the San Francisco counterculture covered in great detail by Markoff (2005) and Turner (2006a, 2006b), rejecting their analyses without even nodding toward them” (112). For the Tuner reference, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
  15. Anderson, “Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful.”
  16. Patrick D. Anderson, “How I Was Accused of Fascism for Writing About WikiLeaks,” WikiLeaks Bibliography Blog, March 12, 2025: https://wikileaksbibliography.org/blog/how-i-was-accused-of-fascism-for-writing-about-wikileaks/.
  17. David Brin, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Addison-Wesley, 1998. See also my response to Brin in Patrick D. Anderson, “Of Cypherpunks and Sousveillance,” Surveillance & Society 20, no. 1 (2022): 1-17.
  18. Anderson, Cypherpunk Ethics, 4.
  19. Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow (MIT Press, 2001), 81–83.
  20. Assange et al., Cypherpunks, 49.
  21. Daniel Bernstein, “The sins of the 90s: Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance,” The cr.yp.to blog, October 28, 2024: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20241028-surveillance.html
  22. David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (Macmillan Publishing, 1967); Bamford, The Puzzle Palace.
  23. Charles Berret, “The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography,” Diss, Columbia University, 2018: 266.
  24. Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, “New Directions in Cryptography,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22, no. 6 (1976): 654.
  25. See Patrick D. Anderson, “How Not to Conduct Academic Research on WikiLeaks: A Case Study,” WikiLeaks Bibliography Blog, January 6, 2022: https://wikileaksbibliography.org/blog/how-not-to-conduct-academic-research-on-wikileaks-a-case-study/; and Anderson, “Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of the Cypherpunk Movement.”
  26. Daniel Domscheit-­Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website (Crown, 2011).
  27. Patrick D. Anderson, “Review: Christian Cotton and Robert Arp (eds.), WikiLeaking: The Ethics of Secrecy and Exposure,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, vol. 19, no. 1 (2020): https://logosjournal.com/article/cotton-arp-wikileaks-review/
  28. John Keane, “Lunch and Dinner with Julian Assange, in Prison,” The Conversation, February 17, 2013: https://archive.md/CCWHr
  29. Just for a short list of Snowden-related primary and secondary sources, see Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (Metropolitan Books, 2019); Patrick D. Anderson, “Review of Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record,” Ethics and Information Technology 22, no. 2 (2020): 129-132; and Patrick D. Anderson, “On Moderate and Radical Government Whistleblowing: Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as Theorists of Whistleblowing Ethics,” Journal of Media Ethics 37, no. 1 (2022): 38-52.
  30. See Snowden, Permanent Record, chapter 5 and pages 293-294.
  31. Snowden, Permanent Record, 8.
  32. Glenn Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (Picador, 2011), 96.